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London, Celebs and Positive Activities: Plings interviews What’s Up Information
Posted on October 21st, 2009 No comments
What’s Up Information is a new London-based social enterprise using innovative ways to get young people involved in positive activities in the capital. They’re currently working in seven London boroughs, with plans to expand across the city.In our interview, What’s Up Information’s Lucy Ferguson explains how they use celebrities to promote positive activities, the difficulties of communicating with young Londoners, and why young people don’t like being sold to.
You’re based in London, the capital city. It makes sense that young people in remote villages claim to have nothing to do, but why would they say that in London?
In a nutshell youth initiatives find it difficult to communicate to young Londoners. This is not an easy audience to talk to and you can’t rely on traditional marketing or the local borough infrastructure to get the message out that there’s plenty going on. What’s Up Information exists to help bridge the communication gap.
How do you go about promoting positive activities to young Londoners?
We promote in two ways: through producing and distributing a printed pack containing celeb content, competitions & promotional material from youth initiatives and through our daily updated website and social network sites.
You said you use celebrities to help promote positive activities. Why do you do this?
We use celebrities to attract initial attention and make young people want to take our packs home. Having researched a variety of age groups we found music and celebrity were two aspects of the media they were really interested in.
How do you get celebs on board?
We’ve found it very easy to get celebrities to talk to us because a lot of artists in the charts right now are Londoners who understand the problems attached with growing up in a big city.
What do you do to make sure the events you promote are relevant and interesting to young people?
We’ve got a team of young journalists out and about reviewing events and listings so that we can offer our opinion on the opportunities we’re promoting. All our editorial is done by young people as it much of the packing and street teaming work. We’re also in the process of assembling a youth advisory board.
Tell us more about why you choose to directly involve young people in running What’s Up Information.
It makes perfect sense to have young people at the heart of our business! It’s really important to make the packs desirable and the website grow and we need youth advocacy to make that happen. Plus working with young people keeps your ideas fresh and on target to help What’s Up Information be as effective as possible.
Do you promote all positive activities within a given borough, or do you focus on specific types of positive activities.
We’re out looking for all activities that are positive
What’s the biggest challenge to getting young people interested in what’s going on in their area?
When we’ve done research we’ve found that young people often aren’t looking for things to do, they’re also very sensitive to being ‘sold to’, being involved with things that aren’t cool or just doing something new – especially on their own!
Anything else you’d like to say?
I believe the children are our future (as MJ once sang) but seriously, the young people we’ve been working with have really opened my eyes, they’re bright, funny, interesting and exciting to work with. What’s Up Information will go from strength to strength because we’ll keep evolving with the help of the young people we work with until there is no excuse for any young Londoner to ever say ‘ there is nothing going on in my area’
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Boris thinking about Plings
Posted on April 29th, 2009 No comments
We’ve just seen the report ‘A Sporting Future for London‘ and it’s great to see a mention of a possible Plings roll out across London to support the delivery of sporting and cultural activity information as part of London 2012.Nothing confirmed yet… but of course, we’ll make sure readers of the Blog are the first to know any more news…
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Free travel, but how to get there?
Posted on January 27th, 2008 No commentsA couple of weeks ago, news came out about the Zip Card scheme, which would enable all young people aged 11-18 to free travel around London, through use of a smartcard similar to the existing Oyster card.
It seems that the scheme will unify all the existing free transport schemes across the capital – so not sure how someone from Manchester aged 11-18 could travel for free, for example. Use of a Zip would also need to be backed up with a photo ID, with some news sources picking up on the intentions and implications to combat anti social behaviour.
Anyone in London care to comment?
Anyway, in relation to public transport, I also took a peak at some of the stuff that Google are now doing with their online maps and transport timetables. Behind this sits a data standard for such information – designed to enable others to re-use it.
People might be aware at how difficult it is at the moment to get simple and reliable public transport information online or on your phone in the UK, so the advent of some data standards, enabling others to “mash-up” this info would be welcome. Whilst it has mainly been US cities that have contributed their information to the Google Transit standard, the South East of the UK now take part.
As part of my oh-so-clever trend to connect ideas and news recently, I wonder how those with Zip cards could do this mashing..??
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